Bordeaux 2010 Primeurs: Médoc & Haut-Médoc
The primeurs week is, for me, something short of a week. I take the first flight out to Bordeaux on Monday morning, having slept over at an airport hotel the night before, an early start that affords me a full programme of tasting on that first day. I return on the Thursday of the same week, usually late afternoon, although this year I stayed on a little longer, taking an evening flight back to the UK instead. This meant another sleepover at Gatwick before taking a morning flight back to Edinburgh, but the extra few hours this delayed return gave me in Bordeaux was probably worth it. Even so, the schedule for the four days remained nothing less than hectic; and every year there are casualties, prominent châteaux that fall off my list of appointments. This is a sad but inevitable complication of working within a time-limited environment. I would like to spend longer in Bordeaux, but other features of modern life – in particular the need to subsidise Winedoctor, which generates very little income, with a ‘proper’ job – prevents me from spending more time tasting.
Having acknowledged these deficits in my reporting, some of which sit at the very upper end of the Bordeaux hierarchy (there was no time for Le Pin this year, sadly – I’m expecting Jacques Thienpont’s letter of complaint to arrive any day now), it should perhaps come as no surprise that at the lower end there are also some deficiencies in my report. And the exiguity of my tasting is laid most bare today, in my Médoc and Haut-Médoc instalment, which features a measly eight wines, when ten times that number would have been more appropriate! This is, I accept, a great shame, as in a vintage such as 2010 it is in appellations such as Moulis, Listrac and similar that the bargains are to be found. Here there are petit-châteaux which should, with the ripeness of fruit and freshness of acidity coming out of this vintage, raise their game and make something delicious to drink. And they might even offer a promise of development into something quite special in the cellar. The ‘sleepers’ of the vintage, if you will?
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